Samara Joy McLendon was born on November 11, 1999, in the Bronx, New York, and grew up in the borough's Castle Hill neighborhood in a gospel-singing family. Her paternal grandparents, Elder Goldwire and Ruth McLendon, founded the Philadelphia gospel group the Savettes, and her father, Antonio McLendon, is a singer and bassist who toured with the gospel musician Andraé Crouch. She came to jazz relatively late: at Fordham High School for the Arts she began singing it in her senior year, and she won the Best Vocalist award at Essentially Ellington, the high school competition run by Jazz at Lincoln Center.

She then enrolled at SUNY Purchase College, where she took a Bachelor of Music in Jazz Studies in 2021. Her first lesson there was with the singer Alexis Cole, she took trumpeter Jon Faddis's jazz transcription class, and the guitarist Pasquale Grasso and drummer Kenny Washington, both of whom later recorded with her, are listed among her former professors. In 2019, as Samara McLendon and a junior at Purchase, she won the Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, singing "Perdido." She was the second Purchase singer to take the prize, after Cyrille Aimée in 2012, and one of the judges, bassist Christian McBride, called her a once-in-a-generation talent.

Working with the producer Matt Pierson, who later became her manager, she recorded her self-titled debut while still a student, with Grasso, bassist Ari Roland and Washington as her trio. Whirlwind Recordings released Samara Joy on July 9, 2021, and JazzTimes named her its best new artist for the year. Viral video performances and a run of festival and television dates followed, including a Today show appearance with Grasso in February 2022, Carnegie Hall's Notable Occasion benefit on June 15, 2022, and the 2022 Newport Jazz Festival. She moved to Verve Records for Linger Awhile, released on September 16, 2022, with Washington, Grasso, pianist Ben Paterson and bassist David Wong, plus a three-horn front line on "'Round Midnight."

At the 65th Grammy Awards on February 5, 2023, she won Best New Artist and Best Jazz Vocal Album for Linger Awhile. She was the first jazz artist to win Best New Artist since Esperanza Spalding in 2011, and the album reached number one on Billboard's jazz albums chart after the ceremony. Later in 2023 she issued duo versions of songs from the album with pianist Gerald Clayton, released "Tight," a self-produced reading of a Betty Carter tune recorded at Electric Lady Studios with pianist Luther Allison, bassist Mikey Migliore and drummer Evan Sherman, and put out the six-track Christmas EP A Joyful Holiday on October 27. "Tight" won Best Jazz Performance at the 66th Grammys in February 2024, and at the 67th, on February 2, 2025, A Joyful Holiday won Best Jazz Vocal Album while "Twinkle Twinkle Little Me," a duet with pianist Sullivan Fortner, won Best Jazz Performance.

Portrait, her third studio album, came out on Verve on October 11, 2024. She co-produced it with the trumpeter Brian Lynch and recorded it at Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, live in the room with her seven-piece touring band, usually in two or three takes per song; the eight tracks mix standards with a vocal adaptation of Charles Mingus's "Reincarnation of a Lovebird." It won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Jazz Album in February 2025, and on April 30, 2025, International Jazz Day, she made her Carnegie Hall debut in Stern Auditorium, playing the album's material. At the 68th Grammys on February 1, 2026, Portrait won Best Jazz Vocal Album, her sixth Grammy in total; "Peace of Mind / Dreams Come True" from the same album was her seventh nomination and did not win.

Her recent work has spread across several projects. In 2025 she released the singles "Flor de Lis (Upside Down)," a Portuguese-language cover of a Djavan song arranged by her drummer Evan Sherman, in June, and "Three Little Words," arranged by alto saxophonist David Mason and recorded during the Portrait sessions, on September 26, and she sang "Old Folks" on the Christian McBride Big Band's Without Further Ado, Vol. 1. In 2026 she sang two songs and co-wrote their lyrics for Brian Lynch's album Torch Bearers, and after a sold-out run at the Blue Note in Los Angeles in April she released a recording from it, the five-track EP Live at the Blue Note L.A., her first live release, on Verve on October 23, 2026. Her announced tour dates run through Europe in November 2026 and into the United States through March 2027.

Samara Joy sings the standards of the swing and bebop eras with a cool, enveloping tone and unhurried phrasing, and critics have placed her in the line of Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald; AllMusic's Matt Collar heard Betty Carter as well as Vaughan in her reading of "Autumn Nocturne" on Portrait. She has named Vaughan, Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole and Carmen McRae as the singers she turns to for perspective on telling a story, and she cites Holiday as an inspiration for her glamorous stage style. Her gospel upbringing in a family of church singers is the other strand in her singing, and Pasquale Grasso and Kenny Washington, her professors at Purchase, are the core of the rhythm section on her first two albums. From Portrait onward she works as a bandleader and co-producer as much as a singer: the album was cut live with her touring septet, its arrangements are credited to the band's horn players and drummer, and she has said that recordings by Duke Ellington and arrangements by Benny Golson pointed her toward its direction. She also writes lyrics, as on the two songs she contributed to Brian Lynch's Torch Bearers. Reviews have been warm throughout: The Observer's Dave Gelly praised the poise of her debut, Jazzwise gave Portrait five stars and AllMusic four, and she won six Grammy Awards between 2023 and 2026.